(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)
It is always a pleasure of the greatest magnitude when you dive into a sci-fi novel which always promises some thrillingly big and sweeping storytelling and it goes even bigger and bolder than you expected.
It’s hard to be surprised in our everything-on-the-table preview-manic digital culture but Gareth L. Powell absolutely and completely pulls it off with Jitterbug, a novel which sports a playful-sounding title which is subverted in the best ways possible at every turn by a narrative which very much adheres to the idea that you play big or you go home.
Spoiler alert: Powell most definitely does not go home.
Jitterbug takes its premise, which centres on a bounty hunter named Copernicus Brown and his close-knit crew rescuing a woman named Amber Roth from the ruins of a ruined spaceship only to find some unsavoury people want what she’s got, and runs, or rather flies with it through a solar system which looks nothing like the one with which we are familiar.
In this altered reality, the four outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are no more, their dominating forms disassembled and reshaped into eight massively large segments stretching for hundreds of millions of kilometres each known collectively as the Swirl, which is if they drew into each other would create a mammoth inner solar system enveloping Dyson Sphere.
They’ve shown no signs of doing that and so humanity has colonised the surfaces of the segment, creating a solar system-wide society held together together by the Solar Assembly and kept in line by the security forces of Sol-Sec.
The one hard truth I’d learned about the past was that it couldn’t be changed. It couldn’t be edited or rewritten, only lived with. No matter how hard you wanted to, you couldn’t fix days that were dead and gone. All you could do was try to make sure the days to come were better.
And maybe, just maybe, I [Amber Roth] could do that.
Perhaps Copernicus and I could find some way to do it together.
If we survived.
Everything looks tidily and neatly in their place, the uneasy connections between a range of different groups held in place by a political entity which ensures that the less than stellar reach of humanity flourishes to some sort of liveable, continuing extent.
But when Copernicus and his crew of colourful pilot and exuberant personality Kiki, towering Norwegian mechanic Ulf and his apprentice and Copernicus’s cousin McKenzie, aided without fail by Jitterbug’s AI soul who takes the form of a parrot, pick up Amber Roth, their Good Samaritan act sets in train a series of events so momentously status quo-altering that its highly unlikely that the solar system will ever be the same again.
The brilliance of Jitterbug is that it appears at first to simply be a cleverly and artfully constructed story of a crew of innocents uncovering a deep dark secret that the powers that be do not want coming to light.
That in itself would make a compelling story, and it does in ways that tantalise and enthrall, but Powell builds and builds on his secretive conspiracy in such a fantastically imaginative way that you are left on the edge of your seat, jaw on the floor at how outrageously audacious he is and how well he covers his initial tracks so you don’t suspect a thing.
Oh, you do know that there is something ancient and vast slowly sweeping into the solar system far from the fringes of known space but it’s how Jitterbug weaves it all together that makes this novel such a hugely pleasurable joy to read.
Somewhere in the middle of all this epic storytelling, and there any mention of where the narrative heads must cease lest spoilers cruel the exciting potential which awaits, Jitterbug also manages to be a rather playfully lovely and at times painfully emotive love letter to the power of found family to remake the world in which you leave.
Found families, especially of the renegade space ship crew kind are a staple of sci-fi storytelling and Powell does a warm and fuzzy exemplary job of ticking the usual jocular, oneliner-rich boxes that come with these sorts of implicitly close character connections.
What makes Jitterbug such a moving experience to read is how much depth he adds to the found family at the heart of the story, and how the ties that bind them are integral, absolutely integral to the bigger more epic strands of the narrative.
The novel is a prime example of how epic storytelling rises and falls on the strength of the character building at its heart, and how the stronger and more meaningful the characters are, the more invested you become in the story.
Sure, you can go epic and throw in blockbuster-y twisty and turny grenades which reset expectations on an almost page-by-page basis but fail to give the characters their due and it feels deflatingly and disappointingly empty.
While I [Jitterbug] was still debating whether or not to initiate the conversation, the stealth ship came back and interrupted my indecision.
> We have a problem.
> What kind of problem?
> The unprecedented kind.
That is not a fate which befalls Jitterbug and nor does it even come close to troubling it.
From the word go, character is king in Jitterbug, an emphasis and priority which means that when the novel does go BIG and expansive and wide and to places you simply don’t see coming – have we mentioned how much we love the fact that we are countlessly surprised more than we are not? Because we LOVE it; Powell is at the top of his game here – it soars, folding you into a narrative which means something to you because it matters intrinsically to the power who power it and give it life.
You are propelled through the story, partly on the power of breathtakingly amazing plot shifts, but mostly because the people who make it zoom along are given the time they need to be fully fleshed out, to matter to each other, and to the readers, and to give undeniably blockbuster-level storytelling a richly emotionally resonant core.
It means that when the collective shit the great galactic fan, it’s not just spectacle and shock and awe moments, which are in and of themselves pretty impressive and compellingly involving, but rich and raw humanity at work, the kind which takes the big events and gives a quiet and breathlessly meaningful emotional intimacy, the likes of which make it all MATTER.
And matter it does with Jitterbug feeling like a Spielbergian epic tale which knows we love to be taken on grand adventures which defy everything we know and which stoke the fires of our imagination but which, if they are to have resonance and meaningful memory over the long term, must have people at the heart whose rises and falls are ultimately the main game in town and whose actions always matter than any of the big plot twists to which they are both hostage but also the architects of what comes next and which shapes the rest of their endlessly fascinating lives, and that of everyone around them.